Distributed Platoon Control via Semantic-Aware Identification Codes

Evolving communication technologies and standards enable novel IoT use cases, such as real-time edge or fog assistance for distributed sensing and control in smart environments. Synchronizing the system state at centralized management entities with distributed components is a network resource-hungry task. Semantic communication is envisioned to cope with rapid network traffic increase and associated performance degradation by optimizing resource utilization for the application goal. Identification (ID) codes are a novel semantic technology that reduces network traffic for remote synchronization by representing a potentially multidimensional system state with a short tag. This work exploits ID codes in the intelligent transportation context. The vehicles in a truck platoon use ID codes to synchronize their distributed control decisions with the centralized edge server. We present one of the first frameworks demonstrating the advantages of using ID codes in practical scenarios. We show that the truck platoon management utilizing ID codes is <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\sim 40 {\%}$</tex> more efficient than a fully distributed control scenario and never lags behind a fully centralized control. Moreover, ID codes reduce network traffic by <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\sim 4$</tex> times compared to the latter.